Telenor rejects the demand from the IFPI to block access to the Swedish website, The Pirate Bay, and finds there to be no legal basis for the demand for ISPs to control and/or assess the content users download. At the same time, Telenor does not condone pirating of material and illegal file sharing.

“Asking an ISP to control and assess what Internet users can and cannot download is just as wrong as asking the post office to open and read letters and decide what should and should not be delivered.”

“This is by no means a new issue, and it applies to the entire Western knowledge-based economy. Telenor sympathises with Intellectual property rights holders whose content has been illegally
distributed, but in our opinion, it is wrong to claim an ISP is liable for any illegal activity by its users on the Internet,”

These folks a just the latest to find themselves in some hot water. When are people going to smarten up?

# awn Guse of Federal Way, Washington. Guse, unrepresented by counsel, agreed to pay Activision $100,000 (CoD 3 Wii, CoD 3 Xbox 360) to settle the case.
# Chris Hyman of Abbeville, South Carolina. Hyman, also unrepresented, agreed to pay Activision $25,000 to settle the case. (CoD3 Wii, Tony Hawk’s Project 8, Xbox 360).
# George Laflin of New Jersey. Laflin, apparently the only defendant who had an attorney, agreed to pay Activision $100,000 (CoD 3 Xbox 360).
# Maryanne Leach of Northome, Minnesota. Leach, with no attorney, agreed to pay Activision $1,000.
# Kenneth Madden of York, South Carolina agreed to pay Activision $100,000 (CoD 3 Wii, Cod 2 The Big Red One PS2, Tony Hawk’s Project 8, Xbox 360). He too was unrepresented.
# James R. Strickland, aka Ryan Strickland of New York State; case is still active (CoD3 Xbox 360).

…let’s contemplate how severely Hasbro doesn’t get it. The company actually thinks it owns the game, when consumers actually own the game, no matter how many legal documents Hasbro can throw at the situation.

Un-fucking-believable.

Update: The creators of Scrabulous have launched a new Facebook application, Wordscraper.

Beyond computer-to-computer media-sharing, doubleTwist lets users synchronize media sitting on their computers to mobile devices they or their friends own, simply by “dragging and dropping” media files into a desktop folder that then drops copies of the media files onto the mobile devices over the Web.

This is similar functionality provided by Red Chair Software’s Anapod, which the Hobo’s Mom uses for dragging and dropping to her iPod. It also seems to mimic the functionality of Tunebite, which plays back songs in fast forward and re-records them as unprotected files.

While there appears to be little hope for DRM when users are determined to get around it, I still maintain that there is very little that people can’t do under “Fair Use” with DRM protected files.

AnyDVD is used for removing DRM and CSS copyright protections. CloneDVD is used for the actual copying of the disc, compressing video to fit one disc, and removing menus, alternate languages and other elements of a DVD that a user may not want to keep in an archived copy of a movie.

Multiple versions are readily available on most popular file sharing networks, and all have proven to be quite effective at recovering files from crashed and deleted hard drives.

From their website:

GetDataBack will recover your data if the hard drive’s partition table, boot record, FAT/MFT or root directory are lost or damaged, data was lost due to a virus attack, the drive was formatted, fdisk has been run, a power failure has caused a system crash, files were lost due to a software failure, files were accidentally deleted…

If you’ve experienced a meltdown, this is one handy program to have around. Free demos available from the publisher that will show you exactly what files the software will recover. Very useful in deciding to make a purchase or not.

The Digital Hobo fully recommends buying a copy for the next time your computer crashes. Just keep the program on your USB drive. It wont do you much good if it only lives on the drive that crashed.

Visit the official Portable Apps website to download the latest versions of free, open source software that gives you what you need wherever you go.

Tired of not having your bookmarks or favorite websites? Or your contact lists? Sure you can access them from the web, but then you leave cookies and passwords on computers that aren’t yours. Portable Apps solve these problems, and then some.

There’s free and portable versions of FileZilla (FTP), Firefox (browser), Gaim (IM), Thunderbird (email), Audacity (audio editing), VNC MediaPlayer (audio/video player), 7-Zip (compresson Zip/RAR), and ClamWin (antivirus for your USB stick), just to name a few.

OpenOffice.Org has a portable version as well, but I’m assuming that most places that have a PC have some kind of word processor, and your “real” docs probably aren’t much to worry about.

I’ve been carrying around a 1GB flash stick with those apps wherever I go. At worse, I’ve been able to connect to my FTP site with one click and grab any docs that I didn’t have with me.

Good stuff, you cheap bastard.

You can download the Public Beta from Apple’s Safari site.

Visit their Tour Page and sign up for a session. Any session. Some of the sessions, I’m sure, were more useful. If you are a developer, I’d bet the developer section was pretty informative. However the IT Manager room was full of people who were clearly not IT managers.

That said, as your parting gift, you get a big fat juicy copy of Office 2007 and MS Groove 2007.

Not a bad way to waste an afternoon at “Microsoft Training.”

Check out the official Portable Apps website and grab everything.  Open Office, FTP, anti-virus, web browser, media player, compression and chat apps are all included.

These apps run off of your USB flash stick and require no installation to the operating system. They run safe and secure on any computer, and leave no trace when you are done. Simply can’t be beat when you need to hop online at a friend’s house, client’s office or internet cafe.